The next day was a dreary one for Emma. Everything seemed to her
enveloped in a black atmosphere floating confusedly over the exterior of
things, and sorrow was engulfed within her soul with soft shrieks such
as the winter wind makes in ruined castles. It was that reverie which we
give to things that will not return, the lassitude that seizes you after
everything was done; that pain, in fine, that the interruption of every
wonted movement, the sudden cessation of any prolonged vibration, brings
on.
As on the return from Vaubyessard, when the quadrilles were running in
her head, she was full of a gloomy melancholy, of a numb despair.
Leon reappeared, taller, handsomer, more charming, more vague. Though
separated from her, he had not left her; he was there, and the walls of
the house seemed to hold his shadow.
She could not detach her eyes from the carpet where he had walked, from
those empty chairs where he had sat. The river still flowed on, and
slowly drove its ripples along the slippery banks.
They had often walked there to the murmur of the waves over the
moss-covered pebbles. How bright the sun had been! What happy afternoons
they had seen alone in the shade at the end of the garden! He read
aloud, bareheaded, sitting on a footstool of dry sticks; the fresh wind
of the meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nasturtiums
of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her life, the only
possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized this happiness when it came
to her? Why not have kept hold of it with both hands, with both knees,
when it was about to flee from her? And she cursed herself for not
having loved Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession
of her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms and
say to him, "It is I; I am yours." But Emma recoiled beforehand at the
difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires, increased by regret,
became only the more acute.
Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her boredom; it burnt
there more brightly than the fire travellers have left on the snow of
a Russian steppe. She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she
stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything
that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most
immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined,
her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness
that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her
lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete--she gathered it all up, took
everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.